Hi Davy, I am glad to hear you had no serious issues with XAudio2, but I was merely reporting what I have heard back from Philip Bennefall and others who tried to use it for a production product. I'm more or less on the fence myself weather or not to adopt it, but it is certainly an option for a Windows developer. Seeing as DirectSound is pretty much deprecated on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 it is really either XAudio2 or OpenAL for a Windows developer anyway. DirectSound is really only on Windows 7 on up for backwards compatibility and nothing more. What's more DirectSound is emulated rather than actually being the DirectSound 8 library we know from XP and earlier.
As for XNA I'm not too sure what Microsoft is doing with it. I have heard the roomers that Microsoft is thinking of scrapping the XNA Framework which would not surprise me. They have not been too committed to .NET development of games. they came out with Managed DirectX, scrapped that, came out with XNA, are looking at scrapping that, and that is primarily why I moved away from C# .NET because Microsoft is too fickle about supporting their .NET APIs where games are concerned. It is also for that reason why I have been looking at open source solutions like OpenAL for my Evolution Engine. At least there I can have access to the code, know someone somewhere is supporting the API, and I am not forced to switch audio library's on a whim because Microsoft or someone decided to switch APIs mid development. Cheers! On 12/14/13, Davy Kager <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > I have had no trouble with XAudio2. That coupled with very low-level input > handling using the Win32 API made for some awesome times. Still, the > disadvantage to such low-level work (I count XAudio2 as relatively low-level > too), is that it takes more work to get things done - including more > evaluation of your code to make sure it won't crash at run-time. And the > difference inr esponsiveness isn't too big anyway. We're talking > milliseconds here. The one thing I did like about those components is that > it was mostly event-driven. I'm not a big fan of polling for input. > Unfortunately, I've read that Microsoft dropped XNA, so I wouldn't be > surprised if XAudio2 is going too. That's two abandoned audio systems in > five years. > > And really, OpenAL isn't so bad. There are devices with hardware support > (though I'm disabling that to ensure a uniform user experience). And with > the rise of Steam, being able to target Linux is a good thing. Then there > is the iOS thing, they use OpenAL too. Joal is a great option for Java > developers. For iOS there is the excellent Object-AL. > Sadly Joal seems to have some issues acquiring the soundcard at times, but > that's probably partly the fault of Windows and its drivers. It's also a > bit of a resource hog, it does a lot of memory copying that more low-level > APIs avoid. But hey, it does save you some resource managing. > > DirectSound was great, and it's cool that it still works on modern systems, > but just like with VB6 I'd strongly suggest new developers skip it > altogether. As you said the 3D part is very much broken unless you do your > own tweaking (and even then), and to be fair the API really isn't that easy > to use compared to XAudio2 or OpenAL. The one nice thing is that you can > easily script against it, but that's not too important for serious game > developers. > > Cheers, > Davy --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
